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MiniDV – the newest hallucinogen!
Here’s a fun, unexplained phenomenon:
Editing a scene in a 24p miniDV indie short that was shot 16×9 on a Canon XL2. The scene contains a photographer using a Pentax K1000 and a rather large 1980’s attachable flash – the kind with such a high pitched recharging noise, dogs often lose bladder control.
Every time the camera takes a picture while the miniDV is rolling, the footage shows about 5 frames of a mosaic effect – 2 frames leading up, one frame that’s massively mosaically pixelized with only gray, green and magenta colors, then 2 frames getting you back to reality. The funny thing is, this effect is the same whether the Pentax’s flash goes off or not (you hear a click, and there it is), and regardless of the location or how it’s lit… always gray, green and magenta. Also, the two cameras can be up to six feet away, and I can still see it. Radioactive fallout? Demonic messages? Maybe Canon and Pentax just don’t get along. Regardless, it’s annoying to edit but fun to watch.
I should pass off the mosaics as art and make a coffee table book – there’s a market for everything, right?
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\`(=)`/…Pixel Monkey
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6 Replies
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It is tryig to e helpful by showing you where you should put the 5 frame flash.
Ingenious little devil, huh?Charlie
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Never key in on a walkie talkie radio near a recording beta sp deck.
Interference like you would not believe!
Added a LOT of excitement to a live event I was working about seven years ago.
Regards,
Tom Meegan
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Wow, that’s neat, it’s an effect I must now try to reproduce for myself.. Unfortunately I have neither of the cameras required.
I will just stick to dropping the camera for the cool breakup pattern effect.
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What you see is probably an infrared focusing light from the camera, or from the flash.
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I had to laugh. Sorry. Obviously jim is too young to remember the days before “Auto Everything”. Actually, the K1000 would be “Auto Nothing”. I believe it did have a battery for the manual exposure control.
My old Nikkormat Ftn (with split-image focusing screen!) was a real brick. Actually it weighed much more than a brick. I knocked it off a table once – didn’t even mark the all-metal body. And my Sunpak “potato masher” flash was another handful all by itself.
I might not have been a better shooter back then, but I was in better shape from lugging all that equipment around.
“Where ever you go, there you are.”
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[Tom Meegan] “Never key in on a walkie talkie radio near a recording beta sp deck.”
A Betacam next to two top fuel dragsters at launch gives a nice 20-frame acid trip as well.
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